The Last Love Song (62 page)

What this meant for Robbins's authors was unclear. Didion felt extremely anxious. She had not published a book since 1970, and
Fairy Tales
was not snapping into focus. To make matters worse, before she could work things out, Robbins's defection became public. A reporter named Sarah Gallick published a short column in
Harper's
magazine saying “such major writers as Joan Didion and Donald Barthelme … wanted to follow [Robbins] to S&S, [but] Roger Straus was refusing to release them from their contract option clauses.” So “here is Henry Robbins at S&S, receiving a high salary, and he has no big authors.” Nevertheless, Gallick said, “Didion, with the help of her agent, Lois Wallace, has managed to ‘leap over the wall.'”

Straus, fearing serious damage to FSG's reputation, swore to his colleagues, “None of [my] authors”—Didion, Donald Barthelme, Tom Wolfe, Grace Paley, Walker Percy—“are leaving Farrar, Straus. Over my dead body.”

He did manage to wheedle most of the writers into staying, but Didion proved to be a tougher bird than he was. Through Lois Wallace, she told Straus she had come to see Robbins as a “surrogate father” and couldn't possibly separate from him. She offered to repay the thirty-thousand-dollar first installment on her nonfiction book. She invited Robbins to be a guest in her house for an extended period, a clear signal to Straus where her loyalties lay.

By now, she had begun the novel that would eventually become
A Book of Common Prayer.
Straus invited Wallace to his office, “to our part of town where the rents are low and the literary aromas are vintage,” to discuss the possibility of buying the novel in lieu of the nonfiction book. Straus said the novel would satisfy the existing contract. Wallace knew Didion still wished to go with Henry Robbins. She set up an auction for the book among five publishers, clearly designed to give the edge to S&S and to knock FSG out of the bidding. To no one's surprise, Robbins got the novel as well as a contract for a nonfiction collection tentatively titled
Dream Time Magic.
The combined advance equaled $210,000.

Straus felt betrayed. He threatened legal action. But then he backed off, fearing the financial risks. At no point was he ever ugly with Didion. In fact, a year after the dust had settled, he wrote her a lovely letter, expressing his hope that “the new novel is going well,” reiterating that “we are very big admirers of Didion at Union Square West, and if the time came when you would like to discuss publication of a book with us, we should like to have that happen.”

He was savvy enough to realize Didion was “not the kind of writer that should be put on the block.” He told Wallace's business partner “there was no way she'd earn back her S & S advance: Not good agenting!”

He was right. Eventually, S&S proved to be a snake pit for both Robbins and Didion. Though there was never any question she would follow her editor wherever he went, this was a move she'd often regret.

3

How did Edith Wharton do it?

Her summer house was always full of guests.

She wrote a novel a year, working every morning.

Didion read a biography of her, and came away “terribly impressed.” “I just couldn't see how it could be,” she said. Wharton's guests “would be served breakfasts in their rooms, then work on their letters or whatever until noon, and then everyone would gather in the garden and Wharton would appear and an excursion would be planned for the afternoon … The degree of order she must have had! I've thought about it a lot. For one thing, the telephone didn't ring, but still, the degree of organization required to live that kind of life…”

Didion could only dream of it. The guests in her Malibu house took no excursions except down to the beach, where they drank and wondered who would make a movie of the Patty Hearst story, and who would play Patty. It was like the fevered speculation, a few years earlier, about Roman Polanski: To which high-flying bidder would he sell the rights to his murdered wife?

It turned out, in a few years the Dunnes' friend Paul Schrader would make the Patty Hearst movie, and Natasha Richardson would play the lead role. Around the time of Hearst's trial, the Dunnes got to know Tasha, “an uncertain but determined adolescent with a little too much makeup and startlingly white stockings,” Didion said. Tasha's father, Tony, the distinguished theater and film director, was renting the former home of
Deep Throat
star Linda Lovelace on Kings Road in Hollywood. He had become a good friend of the Dunnes, so when Tasha came to visit from London, where she lived with her mother, Vanessa Redgrave, he introduced her to Quintana and her parents. Instantly, Quintana saw Tasha as a role model. She began experimenting with makeup—something it took Didion a while to notice.

The Wharton summer-house effect was impossible to achieve on warm, lazy evenings when actors, producers, and directors circled one another, working the room. One night, Didion threw a party for around sixty people. She made Mexican chicken; the house smelled of onions and peppers. She hired bartenders and caterers to set up the buffet. She wore a batiste dress, bought in the children's department at Bonwit Teller (her weight was still down, ever since her visit to Cartagena). According to Sara Davidson, a guest at the party that night, Warren Beatty prowled the house, telling people he wanted to do “some gynecological detective work. I'm a combination gynecologist and detective.” At one point, Davidson said, he pulled up a rattan chair, facing Didion on the couch, “opened his knees and pressed her knees between his. ‘This is it for me,' he said. ‘This is all I want, right here. I'm happy.'” Didion fidgeted. Beatty looked at his watch and said, “I don't have to be on the set until ten Monday morning.”

Didion said, “This is not … feasible.”

Did Wharton have to put up with such nonsense?

One thing she
might
have envied was the long, slow drive, much of it skirting the coast, into Los Angeles and back—about forty miles each way. On these journeys, with Dunne at the wheel, Didion spun ideas for her novel, speaking into the wind, testing her husband's reactions. The Southern novel she had once envisioned had given way—but not completely!—to the hallucinatory setting of the Panama airport, which would not leave her mind. But now she also wanted to write about San Francisco—the SLA shenanigans had tugged her attention back to the Bay Area. Novels would be so much easier to write if she started with plot instead of setting, but apparently this was never going to work for her.

So one night in the car, she just decided “to make it all one book”—New Orleans, San Francisco, Central America—she'd “fold in all the various elements so that it would be like seeing more colors than you can possibly take in with one look.”

Offhandedly, Dunne suggested the title
A Book of Common Prayer.
“Maybe because he thought it would take a lot of prayer to get such a project off the ground,” Didion said.

*   *   *

Off the ground they went, taking Quintana, to Chicago, Cleveland, Johnstown, Pennsylvania, and Buffalo. Chasing rock stars.

John Foreman, whom Dunne had met his sophomore year at Princeton, when Nick took him with Grace Kelly to a party, was a producer now, and he loved the rock 'n' roll movie idea. The Dunnes had worked with him on a number of aborted “deals,” including a thriller set in an oil field, an idea hatched one day when Dunne thumbed through the annual report of a defunct oil-drilling outfit in which he'd invested. He was in over his head on that one, never even wrote a treatment, but the beauty of
A Star Is Born
was that the picture could be the vehicle for a sound-track album. The right package, here, needed only a slender thread to hold it together, and the Warner Bros. music people could do the rest. It was rumored that Carly Simon said no to the project because the story of a self-destructive rock singer and his beautiful partner was too close to the life she actually lived with James Taylor; certainly, Warner Bros. liked Simon, whose career was soaring, but they wanted nothing to do with Taylor, whose trajectory had veered into a ditch following constant drug abuse. No matter. They could get Elvis. They could get Liza Minnelli. Whoever.

To prepare for writing the screenplay, the Dunnes hit the road to learn about the rock 'n' roll business: “[T]hree weeks of one-night stands in the armpit auditoria and cities of the land,” Dunne said.

“You'd find yourself in … Pennsylvania on a summer's night with a really bad English metal band—you know, I mean just hopeless—and being really thrilled,” Didion said.

In Johnstown, Dunne spent “the better part of an afternoon listening to Uriah Heep's bass player debate the pros and cons of a fretless neck on a Gibson.”

In Cleveland, he watched a member of Led Zeppelin scrawl on a dressing room wall “Call KL 5-2033 for good head.” Dunne said he phoned. “KL 5-2033 asked my room number at the Hollenden House, any friend of the Zeppelin was a friend of hers.”

In Chicago, “a groupie talked about mainlining adrenaline. ‘It only makes you scared,' she said, ‘for twenty minutes.'”

Robert Lamm, the keyboardist for the band Chicago, recalled staying in a “roomy suite” at the Ambassador East in the Windy City. “Led Zeppelin had just left … leaving the management in shock, having swung on the large chandelier in the lobby, pulling it down,” he said. “Mid-afternoon [one day] there was a knock at the door. I opened it to see [bandmate] James Guercio standing with a man and woman I did not recognize. Ushered in, introduced, they then took a short tour of the suite. The couple was soon questioning me about all manner of ‘rock band' routine: travel modes, wardrobe, luggage, sleep schedule, sound checks, food intake, drug intake, and what-all.”

This was one instance when the Dunnes' usually sure instincts, their combined ear for the culture's noise, failed them—one story they didn't
get right.
Too much focus on the riffs and fills. They missed the solos and the bridge.

They were working on an assumption about rock “authenticity” no longer current by the early 1970s. With Dylan, the Beatles, and the Stones, theatricality had been tailored to suit what appeared to be “genuine” stage personae (however mercurial, in Dylan's case). The rock star was either a prophet or a garage-band-mutt like the rest of us; either way, he didn't traffic in bullshit or pretend to be anything other than what he was (“It's only rock 'n' roll, but I like it”).

By 1973 most arena-size rock audiences were hooting “authenticity” off the stage. Glam had kicked down the stadium doors, wearing Elton John's platform shoes. David Bowie coiffed and colored his hair, smudged his gender out of all recognition, and performed as a futuristic messenger for an alien entity that was either a collective consciousness or a giant black hole—it wasn't clear.

In the sixties, sincerity and authenticity had led us all to walk, naively, into the flaming eyes of the National Guardsmen's bayonetted rifles, into stinging clouds of tear gas, into Nixon's not being a crook.

So now we wanted to forget. We wanted a show. We wanted our nightly six grams of coke. We wanted velour bomber jackets and Stirling Cooper trousers. We wanted to see blood on the stage and heads bitten off of bats.

This was a sea change in the culture of rock 'n' roll that Dunne failed to register as he dialed KL 5-2033. Not that it would matter in the end. Eventually, Barbra Streisand seized control of the
Star Is Born
project, and exhibited even less understanding of rock than the Dunnes did.

At the Ambassador Hotel in Chicago, in the Pump Room at midnight, Quintana “ate caviar for the first time,” Didion said. This was a “mixed success since she wanted it again at every meal thereafter and did not yet entirely understand the difference between ‘on expenses' and ‘not on expenses.'” Earlier that evening, she had sat through a Chicago concert “onstage, on one of the amps. The band had played ‘Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?' and ‘25 or 6 to 4.' She had referred to the band as ‘the boys.'”

The Dunnes left the stadium with the musicians, and “the crowd had rocked the car,” delighting Quintana.

These “three weeks of one-night stands” thrilled and energized her. It was so much better than being at home. On the road, wrapped in the pounding music, she was beyond the Broken Man's reach.

The next day, after the midnight caviar, she “did not want to go to her grandmother's in West Hartford,” Didion wrote. “[S]he had advised me … she wanted to go to Detroit with the boys.”

4

For Cinque, as for the wanna-be rock star Charles Manson, it had always been the girls. “I crave the power Charlie Manson had,” Cinque said.

Whether Cinque had Manson's alleged ability to inhabit his girls' heads and make them do his bidding was the central issue in Patty Hearst's trial—a strategy devised by Hearst's lawyer, F. Lee Bailey, who had recently defended one of the soldiers involved in the My Lai massacre.

The SLA saga had begun with stories of CIA mind-control techniques, in the person of Colston Westbrook, Cinque's prison mentor, and ended on the same note, with the court testimony of Louis Jolyon “Jolly” West, a psychiatrist who argued that Hearst had been “brainwashed” through drug and sensory-deprivation methods. West, whose research had been heavily funded by the CIA, was an early experimenter with LSD. In the early 1960s, he'd set himself up in a safe house in the Haight where, he later reported, “an ongoing program of intensive interdisciplinary study into the life and times of hippies was undertaken … The Haight-Ashbury district proved to be an interesting laboratory for observations concerning a wide variety of phenomena.”

What these “phenomena” were, and how much he provoked them using government resources, is unclear, but his place was said to have been filled with young people “blasting off” on various drugs.